I was also skeptical about men being the focus, but when I heard Gregory’s heart that this would be a time not to exclude women, but an opportunity for men to show, with solidarity, they are committed to the Shalom of the city and to help lead in seeking God’s best for it, I could get with that.

What I saw was a gathering of humble men asking God to bless the city and put an end to the things that grieve his heart- poverty and homelessness, exploitation, slavery and violence. We prayed for wisdom and strength for our leaders and for peace for the city. We prayed for God to use us to bless Long Beach, that Long Beach would be a beacon of light to the region, nation and world.

I realized (again) yesterday that sometimes hesitation is part of faith, that sometimes we get on board with something before it’s perfect, knowing that it’s often those moments when God does something truly significant. We put aside our own agendas and ideals, and the way we would do it and just jump in and love and support one another. 

Another thing I saw was not the beginning of a movement, but a bucket of water splashed over the face to refresh a movement of sincere, humble collaboration amongst God’s people in Long Beach. We still must honor and bless those who have paved the way for us and be open to the new things God has in store. We must honor the big things and “not despise the day of small things.” We cannot be so arrogant to think that something starts with us or begins right now just because that’s when we see it or notice it. At the same time we must build monuments in our hearts to the Lord when significant things happen while we tell the stories of His goodness in the past.  We must understand that God has had his eye on this city, his heart in it and his hand for it for a long, long time- before we even thought to pray or do anything.

May this event be that splash of water to refresh the movement of God and his people to continue to seek the Shalom of Long Beach, that His Kingdom come, His will be done, in Long Beach as it is in Heaven. Keep going brothers and sisters!

But what a relief when I finally surrender and actually say, “Can you help me, I can’t do this alone.” Such is the secret to life with God and with His body the Church. And that’s where you all, we come in. I need your help, simply to pray. We have many exciting things happening and beginning to grow, but without prayer, I fear they will not come to fruition. In light of this I thought it would be appropriate to write a prayer focus blog this week. Here are a few requests.

The Downtown Church Network- Formerly the Long Beach Youth Alliance (LBYA), the Downtown Church Network (DCN- final name still pending), a network of over six churches in the downtown area, began to partner with schools and city officials and to streamline their individual youth services to offer supplementary services to students and families. Recently KCLB was given the opportunity to be a part of this amazing network of diverse congregations. Together we will strengthen our network, broaden our impact and more strategically focus our collective assets. Some of the areas we are seeking to work on together are child obesity, asthma, violence prevention, youth development and shared land use. Seeing these, now seven, congregations come together with all their differences, willing to say “we’re better together and our faith motivates us to action” is a hopeful glimpse into what Jesus prayed in John 17. “…that they would be one as you and I are one, so that the whole world would know that you sent me.” Please pray for clarity and unity moving forward and for provision to see our initiatives through.

March ABCD training- I always love training ABCD alongside Scott Jones. This last training was no exception. We got great feedback and had great discussion over implementing the asset-based paradigm in our contexts. When asked to summarize their experience, here’s what a few participants had to say…

“[The ABCD training] has challenged me in reframing my perspective, to try to see myself and others the way God sees us, for our gifts, and use that to motivate me to be bold in building relationships.”- Sam

“Inspiration. Momentum. Strategy.”- Brandon

“It helped me see…that I can bring healing and wholeness to my community in a tangible way and it isn’t that complicated.”- Gabi

“Eye-opening. Enlightening. Encouraging.” Aretha

“Joy to focus on assets rather than needs.”- Sean

“This training made me shift my way of thinking from needs/problems to gifts/assets.”

“Realized I can glorify God by being me.” –Ricardo

“I feel empowered to go out and meet my neighbors.”

Please pray for the individuals and congregations that they would trust God to love their neighbors well and to be Christ’s Church in, for and with the city. Please also pray for our upcoming training May 10-11, that God would show up and move ahead of time in the hearts of participants.

Asset Mapping- Along with our Asset Based Community Development trainings, we’re leading and facilitating efforts to asset map churches. This is simply creating an inventory of the unique and shared gifts of congregations, so that we can make connections in the neighborhoods and throughout the city to affect positive change. We’re conducting interviews and surveys with church staff to bring this about. In addition, we’re scheduled to help one church asset map the Willmore City neighborhood in partnership with some other community organizations and associations on April 20. Please pray for the planning and coordination of this Asset Mapping day, that we would come alongside the tremendous work that’s already being done, and that we’d be sensitive to this community that is still grieving from the recent acts of violence that occurred in March. Please pray also for a spirit of collaboration and unity in seeking the Shalom of the neighborhood.

So, there it is, for now…surrendered. And now you know. Thank you for your prayers and partnership with KCLB, in addition to what you do to seek the Shalom of Long Beach and beyond. I am humbled and blown away by God’s abundance through you, His people!

Last spring we had the privilege of welcoming Michelle Santis, only to have the Lord lead her elsewhere by August. Around that time, KCLB veteran, Susana Sngiem finished her MSW at USC and began to explore the next step God had in store for her. By September we welcomed aboard Greg and Martha Copeland, formerly missionaries in Indonesia with One Challenge International. Both artists, they have brought social enterprise experience and potential, in addition to serving in teaching, coaching, and anti-human trafficking capacities. 

In November, Reggie Galloway, a former Americorp Worker and one of the most faithful volunteers on the planet, answered the call to be a full time Grandpa to his grandbabies in Georgia. Later that month, long-time homelessness expert and advocate, Somatra also decided to pursue other ventures. Finally in January, Scott Jones, our Community Outreach Director and former Americorp worker, left to continue to grow his non profit, We Love Long Beach and his Business, Living Long Beach and to prepare for his wedding this coming June.

In February, board Chair Brian Apodaca stepped down from the board, after serving faithfully since 2009, to focus more on his local and regional responsibilities with Victory Outreach.

BUT God…Continues to provide in amazing and timely ways. For instance, I’ve already mentioned Greg and Martha, who came having heard about our Human Trafficking Task Force, and carry social enterprise and youth development experience. They will be leading Community Development and church partnership efforts in and around the Washington neighborhood of central Long Beach.

The existing board has also rallied to strengthen their commitment to the work God is calling us toward. We are also currently partnering with a Church Resource Ministries team, called the New Minster Community, who has agreed to add muscle and brains in helping us asset map congregations in Long Beach, currently one our largest initiatives. Even as Brian left, God provided Erik Clarke, co-founder of Ten Thousand Villages Pasadena with his wife Sarah. He brings with him experience and expertise as a missionary, businessman and social entrepreneur. 

It is amazing to see God use us in the thin and thick places and to see those who’ve labored alongside us flourish as they obey His call and leadings on their lives. I am reminded that he is a God of abundance and always makes a way, that those rams he provides are often hidden in the bushes of our circumstances.  It energizes me to move forward and trust him all the more. God, it’s your Kingdom. Let it come on Earth as it is in Heaven. Amen.  

Just a few years ago a group of women came together to pray about how to address human trafficking in Long Beach.  Just two months ago, Kingdom Causes Long Beach, along with, law enforcement agencies, almost a dozen different organizations, community groups and several citizens, celebrated the one year anniversary of the formation of the first Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force. 

Each person in attendance comes for a different reason and from a different background. To name just a few - we have doctors, immigration agents, direct service providers, neighbors, police officers, attorneys, retired teachers, mothers, daughters and brothers.  We meet monthly in the basement of a church in downtown Long Beach.  Our meetings revolve around building awareness and educating community members and potential victims, advocating for policy change and law enforcement, and providing aftercare for survivors- including providing assistance to those survivors, international and domestic, who are scheduled to testify against their perpetrators.

Some of our recent activity includes: January 8^th at a city council meeting, the City of Long Beach recognized human trafficking as an issue for the city, acknowledged the Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force for our work, and also affirmed January 11 as Human Trafficking Awareness Day! 

January 12^th The Task Force partnered with the Bixby Strollers, a local walking club, to accomplish our first walk against human trafficking. (pictured above from left to right: Mary White- Gems Uncovered, Nicolassa Galvez- KCLB, Virginia Zart- Junior League LB, Dee Abrahamse- Lift Up, Mary Hinds- Junior League, Adam Anderson- KCLB, Councilwoman Jerry Schipske, Rohida Kahn-Dept Homeland Security, Mayor Bob Foster and Lyndsey Christofferson- research specialist)

Also January 12^th, Gems Uncovered, a drop in center for victims of trafficking and one of our key partnering organizations, held a press conference to raise awareness of the issue in Long Beach. We heard from Pastor Paula Daniels of Forgotten Children, Chief of Police, Jim McDonald, City Prosecutor Doug Haubert, and a representative from Councilmember’s Gerrie Schipske’s office. 

Most of us have full time careers, families, other community commitments, and the busy schedules that many passionate Long Beach residents maintain, yet we continue to make the monthly meetings.  While Kingdom Causes, Junior League of Long Beach and a few donors contribute a very small amount of funding to make copies of the agenda, buy brochures and a few other items – most (basically all) of our needs are met by the community. 

Someone knows a person who will donate their web design services, one family has a not yet rented apartment building and is willing to temporarily house victims waiting for their opportunity to face their captors in court; and a local church bought our Task Force banner. 

What I am reminded of every month as I walk down the stairs to the basement (that is “God-placed” under the church’s sanctuary) and see the faces of my fellow community members is that even without funding, without a boss telling us to attend yet another meeting, and without a full time administrator organizing volunteer task force members – a group of passionate neighbors can take a journey together (as long as it may take) to a destination – eliminating Labor and Sex Trafficking in Long Beach.

To find out more about the Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force and how you can get involved, check us out on Facebook or visit www.kclongbeach.org.

This past Saturday we met for a ½ day spiritual retreat centered on David Benner’s book, The Gift of Being Yourself. It was an incredible time of bonding and vulnerability with leaders from nearly every sector and district of Long Beach. We started by reflecting on who we were at our cores; past our jobs and roles we play, to how God really sees us. Then we talked about what that core meant about what we were created for, our calling and God-given vocation. That led into a time of sharing about our dreams for our city and the next two years as a group. Dreams shared included a spiritual healing and prayer center, cleaning up areas of Long Beach, prayer movements, night-walkers for violence prevention, congregations working together for collective impact, family being restored and education reform to name a few.

I believe this is a significant effort as we connect believers, Christ’s church, from every sector to represent God’s Kingdom come in Long Beach as it is in Heaven.  Jaci Anderson, my wife and a 30\40 participant, said it this way: “it is putting tangible faces to the response of what Jesus is doing in the city. It elevates the conversation from what we’re all doing as individuals to a much greater, collective, long-term impact on the city.” We’re all doing our best to answer Jesus’ call as individuals but if we truly heed his prayer in John 17, that we would all be one as he and the Father are one, our efforts are combined, the result is that the whole world would know that Jesus was sent by God, that he is the Messiah, the Christ and is alive! Our collective impact is the evidence of this, not just our individual lives as a witness. 

I have the privilege of working alongside Eric Marsh from Grace LB, Hope for Long Beach and Plant LB, Rachel Oblon from Parkcrest, Noemi Chavez from 7th St. Church and Del Black from Deep Roots Consulting in organizing this amazing cohort. This team very much represents the DNA we’ve tried to instill from inception of this initiative. We come from different places, worship at different churches and have different callings.

Please pray for our team as we continue to work well together. Our next cohort will be on the diverse make-up of Long Beach and the implications of this on how we lead in our various contexts. Pray for good and open conversations and increased unity as we explore, learn and respond together.

“The ABCD training with my fellow 11th grade teachers was both bonding and reassuring as educators.  It reframed some of the conversations we were already having and gave us some practical tools to help move our students from a deficit mindset into a more asset-based one.  It also gave us a common language to use amongst ourselves, which has been very useful since the training. 

For the students, we recreated a few of the exercises for them, making them fit their context and developmental level, and the results were obvious.  The day they did the naming activity, I heard feedback from teachers and students involved about how 'good it felt' and how 'different than normal' it was to hear and say those types of things to their peers. 

We then grouped them by strengths as they self-selected into role groups to create their own student-planned, student-led, Community Forum.  This was probably the most significant aspect of the project.  They were living in their strengths, and working from their assets, and they flourished. Those who were skilled with graphic design, went to town creating logos and t-shirts and banners.  The detail-oriented folks were keeping lists and calendars.  The public speakers and leaders were practicing their facilitation skills preparing to host the big event. And the bloggers/storytellers and photographers were busy documenting the whole process via tumblr. 

As they went about creating their Community Forums in their respective neighborhoods they implemented some of the asset-mapping tools and were acutely solutions oriented.  The framework from ABCD blended well with some of the ideas behind the importance of a Community Forum as a space of encounter, where people from the same place get to come and be themselves, talk about real issues, and then take it into their own hands to start some kind of coalition to change their own communities. 

Most of the city groups are following up with some of the issues raised at the forums. One has already been invited, and presented at the Hawthorne City Council Meeting this month.

We all anticipate much more to come from these students, what that might look like, who knows?! I do know that the students were forever changed by being allowed to not only operate out of their strengths but to successfully create a space of encounter for their communities.”

Words create reality. Scripture tells us they have the power of life and death. Most of the students, Naomi, her colleagues and many other teachers in our city and region hear the words “at risk”, “troubled”, “poor”, “low-income” associated with them and their peers. These words and the deficit-based thinking they arise from, though containing some truth, create a world of destructive labels these students come to believe and therefore, often live into. 

What if we began to recreate a world that named potential before we trying to fit people into convenient, yet destructive categories? What if instead of “at risk”, we named each other “powerful”; instead of “low-income” we named each other “able to succeed”; instead of “troubled”, “valuable”? You see we are the people of hope. We call things into being by the power of God because we are his sons and daughters. Let us change culture with our words. Let us exercise our dominion and rename our neighbors out of love and hope. Let’s call our sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers valuable, loved, gifted, intelligent and beautiful to the glory of our Creator.

For more info on Environmental Charter High School, check out echslawndale.org/

To learn more about what KCLB is up to and to donate visit kclongbeach.org

I asked Sean, the Pastor of Westside Christian Church, to answer this from his perspective and his response is a beautiful picture of what God's Kingdom looks like in Long Beach.

Enjoy-

Adam Anderson

Running on Empty- By Sean Flannery

For the last 5 or 6 years a man named Barry has lived in and around the church parking lot at Westside. Barry will show up occasionally for services, dinners or Bible studies, but he generally keeps himself on the outskirts. Nonetheless, Barry loves being around, and everyone always seems to be happy to see Barry.

Over the years Barry and I have become friends. Being his friend, I have been trying for quite a while to get Barry to leave. Although that sounds strange, the reason I want him to leave Westside is that Barry smokes crack here, and no matter how hard he works, or how convinced I become that this time he really wants to get help, Barry ends up throwing away whatever opportunity he is given and smoking up any money he’s saved. Inevitably, I find him back in the parking lot sleeping on the concrete. Barry has said that the emptiness he feels because of his past is just too painful. He says it aches deep down.

The other painful part is seeing how much Barry loves people, and how he leans in to being loved by people. I think this is what makes me want to keep going through it with Barry. Some days I see Barry and Jesus walking so close together. Other days, it feels like the only pastoral thing I can think to do is not to call the cops on him. Anyone who has ever held on to hope for an addict knows this story all too well.

A few weeks ago one of the guys in the church put up the cash for Barry to go to a men’s retreat up in the mountains. When Barry got back, a friend asked him how his time at camp was and Barry responded by saying, “It was good, I was on full the whole time!” For the last few days I have been thinking a lot about what Barry said, and how he probably spends a lot of his life “on empty”. I imagine that when you have lived with the uncertainty of not knowing where your next meal will come from, full is a pretty special thing.

The Kingdom that Jesus brought is a Kingdom of fullness. Full joy and full suffering – anyone following after him will get the same. In John 6, Jesus says that if anyone comes to him, he will never go hungry or thirsty. Wherever you find it, the Kingdom destroys emptiness. The Kingdom causes the empty bellies in our city to be filled. The Kingdom causes those dear souls struggling with addiction, and the ever-widening emptiness inside, to find the fullness of God’s audacious claim to make all things new. The Kingdom causes generosity to fill the empty spaces that consumerism only seems to make emptier. It is wild to think that the Kingdom is yet to come in its fullness. I hope I remember that when I’m on empty.

Adam has 10 years of experience catalyzing movements, developing leaders and teams, establishing partnerships, and fundraising within the faith-based community. He has worked within a variety of cultural contexts domestically and internationally. Originally from the Midwest, Adam moved to Long Beach six years ago to marry his Long Beach native wife, Jaci, and to join the LA Metro team of Campus Crusade for Christ. He has since led a team for the Epic Movement of Campus Crusade in Long Beach, Orange County and the Inland Empire.

“Kingdom Causes is a strategic bridge builder for kingdom work and helping make Christ known,” says Adam. “I am honored and excited to be working with such incredibly gifted people in a city, I believe will influence the region, nation and world for generations to come. We’re in the thick of exciting and unprecedented transformation in this city!” Please feel free to welcome Adam and introduce yourself at adama@kingdomcauses.org.

 Jeanette Cheng, Interim Executive Director of Kingdom Causes Long Beach, resigned this month to accept a job opportunity as the Director of Operations for a company in the Middle East country of Qatar. She embarks on this journey at the end of January.

She acted as the interim director for the past 10 months and facilitated meetings between faith leaders. She spearheaded the human trafficking efforts of the organization and recently co-sponsored the first Long Beach Human Trafficking Awareness Roundtable.

 “The beauty of Kingdom Causes is that it isn’t about one person or one church doing the work,” says Jeanette. “It’s about the Church of the City, the different representatives that make up the body of Christ. It’s working together and seeking Shalom.”

Partners are encouraged to keep in touch with Ms. Cheng at jeanettecheng@gmail.com.

Kingdom Causes Long Beach is an important voice, a critical catalyst, and a respected mobilizer among faith-based communities in Long Beach. They work to see tangible community change in three areas: healthy individuals, youth and families, a vibrant Church of the City, and thriving neighborhoods. With a board of directors comprising of government, business and community leaders, KCLB has invested in four neighborhoods, four city causes, and city/non profit partnerships and developed over 50 faith-based partnerships.